FOSSMeet 2011
f19114448.jpg f19127904.jpg 01.jpg f19169944.jpg f22438312.jpg f23828768.jpg f24155032.jpg f23838000.jpg f24201920.jpg f26859504.jpg f26874408.jpg f33891008.jpg 'FOSSMeet 2011' The 7th edition of FOSSMeet was organized during 4-6 Feb 2011 at NIT Calicut. It featured many talks and workshops related to Free and Open Source Software and Technologies. The featured speaker at FOSSMeet this year was Niyam Bhushan who delivered the inaugural talk, among an audience of participants which consisted mostly of science and engineering students. The essence of his inspiring talk was to explain why one should be free. 'Second day' of FOSSMeet started with a talk on 'OpenStreetMap' by Sajjad Anwar of GeoHackers Team. Live demo of editing/creating maps was given using the NIT Ca licut's campus as an example. A full day 'Debian DevCamp' by Praveen A was organized in which participants got to know how the Debian community works and how open source contribution actually happens. Second day also featured a workshop by Naveen Kumar on 'Securing Emails using FOSS' and another workshop on 'Using Open Source Tools to Create Open Hardware' by Jeffrey Antony. Side by side, 'Blender Workshop' by Milad Thaha was being conducted in the FOSSHut of Chamba Project where most of the Chamba Team had gathered. After all the workshops, Niyam Bhushan delivered a talk on 'How to Teach Yourself User Interface Design' in which fundamentals on how to keep oneself updated on latest design innovations happening around the world were given and the need on integrating graphic design principles along with software engineering education was emphasized. 'Third day' featured talks on 'Honeypots: Tracking the Hackers' by Rakesh Mukundan, 'Pitfalls of OSS' by Vishnu Gopal, 'Introduction to Natural Language Toolkit' by Sreejith S & Biju B, 'Introduction to Phoenix Hardware Platform' by Siraj P S & Mohammed Safeer, and 'Practical Machine Learning: A Tutorial on Apache Mahout' by Biju B. Parallely worskhops on 'Git Version Control System' by Noufal Ibrahim, 'Introduction to GNU Compiler Collection' by Praseed Pai and 'Python Workshop' by Kenneth Gonsalves & Anoop Thomas Mathew were also organized which proved to hugely successful and beneficial according to the participants. Last day of FOSSMeet also featured Swathanthra Malayam Computing Project's camp on Malayalam Translation Quality by SMC Team. 'Python Workshop' Workshop on Python was both exciting and resourceful. It consisted of two sessions. Kenneth Gonsalves & Anoop Thomas Mathew were invited as speakers during FOSSMeet and they carried out the worksop with all their experience in python programing. While Kenneth Gonsalves managed the whole students infront of the projector screen, Anoop was solving students' questions and errors individually. We were happy to have one delegate of FOSSMeet who was very happy in sharing his knowledge in python with the students and helping everyone around. During the first session KG taught students the basics of python and ended the session by explaining about functions. Students were pretty happy to learn python's basic from someone like KG and they did have FUN. During the second session the level of teaching and complexity of the program and workshop increased (as most of us were first time users of python) but the interest for gaining the knowledge in such short period never ended, students learned the basics of module creation, regular expressions of python. KG introduced Geany - a text editor - for writing python code and taught students to intreperept the code using terminal by teaching some of the basic commands of linux systems. 'Introduction to GNU Compiler Collection' Introduction to GNU Compiler Collection workshop was one of the most informative workshops during FOSSMeet. Speaker Praseed Pai started from basics of compiling programs to compiling shared libraries and covered topics such as compiling from multiple source files, building static libraries etc., showed capablities of GCC for use with code in C, C++ and Objective C languages using simple programs that the participants enjoyed creating and compiling. Later a demostration on varoius toolkits for GUI development including Qt, GTK, X11, wxWidgets made us realise the true power that GCC and GNU/Linux platforms offers to a developer/programer. 'BLOGS' " Fortunately i got my colleague Biju to attend the FOSSMeet at NIT Calicut.We two delivered talks.We reached at NIT campus on sunday morning.Mr.Karthik met me at the main gate and he directed us to the Bhaskara Hall where all open talks happened. My talk was about Introduction to NLTK and it was stared at 12.05 as requested by Mr.Anil.After discussed about the introduction part about NLP an NLTK i went thru some basic practical work outs.I think it was the best way to learn a practical tool kit. Many doubts came from audience,and i tried to clarify it.Biju also supported me to clarify some doubts.Actually it make the session interactive.After my talk i got a memento from fossmeet team. Biju delivered his talk on Apache Mahout at 3.00 pm.He provided a demo of Document classification and Recommendation systems.Much of the audience were students.I think they got a bit confused because Biju’s talk was on latest technologies like Mahout and Hadoop.He tried his best to explain as simple as possible.Me also tried to clarify map-reduce concept.Question came about some algorithms he discussed. Met many students after our talk.It was very nice to interact with students.Some of them are doing great jobs. Thank u fossmeet team..Bye NITC " SOURCE : Internet LINK : 'http://srijiths.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/fossmeet-nit-calicut/' " For last 3 years, I have been part of the organising team of FOSSMeet. Once I joinedIEEE in first year, it was the first event that I volunteered. Like every time, we first years had to run around and do all kinds of work. From getting desks, arranging the venues to accompanying distinguished guests to the venues from guest house and so on. It was great being a part of a large informal group of people working to promote and contribute to the open world of software, hardware and media. FOSSMeet 2008, virtually dragged me into the FOSS world. It actually was a milestone in my college life. It was later in 2008 that FOSSCell was setup in NIT Calicut by Kishore A. and some of his friends under the guidance of Deepak Sir. From then, I have been a part of FOSSCell and its activities. Talking about FOSSMeets, I have seen several ups and downs with this event. In FOSSMeet 2008, when the event was held in April just before the end semester exams, the turn out was really dull. Later in FOSSMeet 2009, there were many organisational glitches owing to communication gaps between the core organising team members which led to poor publicity of the event. Last year’s edition was organised with much more care. Thanks to Praveen A. (NITC alumnus), Kishore A. and Sajeer Fazil (coordinators) and Hari C. M. (my fellow batch-mate) who stood with me and the whole team for the overwhelming success of FOSSMeet 2010. I should not forget the great work by my immediate juniors, notably Anil Vishnu, Greegar George (registration desk lead) and Febin Rasheed (giving great care to guests and participants as hospitality lead). Team work is a crucial component in every successful event. But for being one of the largest FOSS conferences of India with mere work force of around 20 people, I appreciate my seniors, batch-mates and juniors associated with FOSSMeet for the great work each year. " SOURCE : Internet LINK :''' http://vaamarnath.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/fossmeet-2011/' '''